Case study · Advisory · Retained
The vendor's homework, marked
Eight years of custom ERP, three vendors, and nobody on the client's side who could read the code.
- Client
- Alif Holdings
- Role
- Technical lead, retained
- Scope
- Odoo v10 → v18 · fraud detection
- Status
- Ongoing
- 159Custom modules delivered across eight years
- —Dependency graph mapped to the one module everything hangs off
- 25Issuing raw SQL against v10 table names
- 23Carrying legacy JavaScript
- 40Module gap between the vendor’s inventory and what is on disk
159 modules audited. Migration risk quantified before go-live, not after.
The problem
A group migrating eight years of custom ERP work with an external vendor. Nobody inside could tell whether what came back would match what finance relies on daily. The people best placed to judge could not read a codebase, and the people writing it were reporting on their own progress.
What the role actually is
I don't write the migration. I'm the client's technical counterweight to the vendor, and I own one question: will this behave the way the business needs on day one.
- Reviewed all 159 custom modules and mapped the dependency graph to the one module everything hangs off.
- Surfaced the real risk: 25 modules issuing raw SQL against v10 table names, 23 carrying legacy JavaScript, and a 40-module gap between the vendor's inventory and what is on disk.
- Act as the single filter between vendor, auditors and finance, so leadership gets decisions instead of ticket noise.
Second workstream
An AI fraud detection layer over the group's approval flows, scoped as an external service returning approve, reject or uncertain into the existing steps — testable and reversible without touching finance operations.
Already paying a vendor for this?
Tell me what was promised and what has arrived so far. Thirty minutes. If the work is fine, I'll tell you that and you've lost half an hour.